‘A once in a lifetime opportunity’

Anthony Luzzatto Gardner is clearly relishing his early days as the US ambassador to the EU. He describes it as his “dream job” – and the only diplomatic post that he wanted. “For me this was a once in a lifetime opportunity,” he says.

He is enjoying being back in Brussels – he was here as a trainee in the European Commission (1990-91) and then in the Brussels office of an American law firm. He is also enjoying collaborating with friends he worked with when director for European affairs in the first Clinton administration, who are now in the Obama administration. Mike Froman, the US trade representative, is an old friend – they were at Oxford University together on the same graduate course. He mentions Tony Blinken, deputy national security adviser since January 2013, who served on the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, and Pete Rouse, who was a senior aide to Senate minority leader Tom Daschle in the 1990s and worked for Obama from 2004 until last December.

In the mid-1990s Gardner was working on the US-EU business initiatives of that time, the New Transatlantic Agenda and the Transatlantic Business Dialogue. Leon Brittan was the European commissioner pushing those issues then, and now Gardner is renewing acquaintances with members of Brittan’s team who are prominent in the Commission – notably Catherine Day, the secretary-general, and Jonathan Faull, the director-general for the internal market and services.

What has already struck him, comparing the current US mission to the EU with 20 years ago, is how many more policy areas the two sides are discussing. “We are dealing with a much wider waterfront of issues,” he says, “and that is reflected in the composition of this mission.”

He recalls back in 1994 asking the US treasury department for its position on a common European currency and being told that there was no need for such a position “because it will never happen”. He reflects that people both inside and outside Europe have underestimated the will-power of the EU to carry through its project. He sees the way the EU has dealt with the euro crisis as – whatever the criticisms – another example of that.